BU­L­AWAYO–

West In­dies seemed en route to an un­com­pli­cat­ed vic­to­ry in pur­suit of 258 in their sec­ond game of the tour­na­ment, when they reached 220 for two in the 45th over.

How­ev­er, they lost six wick­ets for 37 runs in the space of 32 balls–in­clud­ing three wick­ets in the last over with four runs re­quired � as Zim­bab­we forced their way back in­to the con­test to earn a share of the points.

"We need­ed 60 runs with eight wick­ets in hand at one stage and nine times out of ten you'd ex­pect the bat­ting side to do that," Rad­ford said.

"I think a lit­tle bit of pan­ic set in which is easy when you're away from home and there's a noisy crowd. To be fair, they (Zim­bab­we) ac­tu­al­ly bowled well and took the pace off on what was a slow-ish wick­et."

He added: "There were big bound­aries and we made a made a cou­ple of good strikes to keep us in with a chance of win­ning and I think af­ter we got in­to that po­si­tion it was just a case of knock­ing the ball around but one or two [play­ers] sort of pan­icked un­der the pres­sure and then we end­ed up with the tie rather than the win which we prob­a­bly de­served."

The run chase had been ex­pert­ly guid­ed by novice Shai Hope who carved out 101 off 120 balls in on­ly his sec­ond One-Day In­ter­na­tion­al, and open­er Kraigg Brath­waite who struck 78 from 117 de­liv­er­ies.

To­geth­er, they put on 162 for the third wick­et, a stand which put the Caribbean side in pole po­si­tion to take vic­to­ry.

"I thought it was out­stand­ing. They were] both great in­nings in a won­der­ful part­ner­ship ... to set up the po­ten­tial win," Rad­ford not­ed.

"We've talked about see­ing the 50 overs in blocks of ten and that there were cer­tain rates we want­ed to go at to keep up with Duck­worth/Lewis. There were a bit of rain clouds around and we thought it could come down to Duck­worth/Lewis and al­so we just want­ed to break it up so play­ers knew what kind of rate to bat at.

"I thought both were ex­cep­tion­al, they ro­tat­ed the strike re­al­ly well. There are two re­al­ly tal­ent­ed young play­ers who played as well as they could play."

De­spite the re­sult, Rad­ford said West In­dies were do­ing all the right things and need­ed to re­main con­sis­tent for the re­main­der of the tour­na­ment.

"I think we're play­ing good crick­et. There are a lot of pos­i­tives to be tak­en from [the game] as dis­ap­point­ed as we were not to cross the line, hav­ing played so well," the Eng­lish­man said.

"We know we are play­ing good crick­et, we had a good win against Sri Lan­ka a cou­ple of days ago... We have to keep do­ing these things, keep do­ing the ba­sics well, keep pin­ning sides down in the field and mak­ing it tough for them to score. And in terms of bat­ting [we have to] set up the in­nings. I thought what was very good with those young bat­ters (Hope and Brath­waite) was that they paced it well, didn't go too rash ear­ly on and got us in­to a sit­u­a­tion where to be hon­est we should have won."

West In­dies face Sri Lan­ka here to­mor­row in their next match. (CMC)